Started a new gig about three weeks ago. Sad to leave the old team and friends. It was awesome and I grew in a lot of ways. But this new place is probably what I was looking for.

It’s way too early to call or judge or even sum up because it takes me about three months to settle into any new job and place. You might think that’s ridiculous but I’ve unsciencely tracked this and it holds up. Slow burn man. It’s three months.

The new place is Goldstar. We sell discount tickets fill events and have amazing customer service in and around this domain. From the tech side, the app is Rails and mobile with a set of amazing devs and ops peeps. We have expanded the tech team very recently and I’m one of the new recruits.

Learning a codebase is rough. Building a codebase and learning along the way is much more natural and comes with an advantage that needs to be cared for and not abused. “Can you not code?” This isn’t happening at the new place. I’m more amplifying what Katrina Owen said on Ruby Rogues about a book that explains downhill synthesis, uphill analysis. It’s way easier to understand a system when you’ve built it. Not even because the code is fresh in your mind. But because you hold the structure and general layout and design, connected by memories and breadcrumbs. When starting from the outside, it’s code splunking. Even if there are tests. Most of the time, I’ll break the test and see what happens. And then fix it. This simulates the synthesis part! Take it apart and put it back together for the put it back together part. This didn’t really click until Katrina enlightened me. I thanked her on Twitter. She was happy. Happy time.

So let’s talk about something pretty serious. This perceived skill gap. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I’m hanging with smart people but have a massive case of impostor syndrome. But right before this job, I wondered if the small-shop world had accelerated way past the big-scary enterprise world. And it has. But it’s not a huge deal! Do you know why? Because C, Unix, TCP/IP, Sockets, CAP Theorem, I/O speeds, SOLID, ACID and all the other non-science-laws-this-is-the-best-we-can-do-guys stuff of computer science is forever. It’s the bedrock. It’s what’s really happening. And once you know or even have a previous story/tale about these things then learning today’s Hipsterware™ is no big deal.

What’s Riak? I don’t know! It’s consistent and available? Oh! It must be really slow. Yep! Great! Right there I can knock it out of a few use cases where Redis or Memcached would be put in there. I could blather on about this. It’s really not healthy. It’s pretty arrogant actually. Most of the work is not in the initial introduction and overview. It’s in the deep and long lived implementation where your cherished newlywed tech betrays you in your most dire moment of edge-case mortality. There are so many things that I think are really great because I haven’t seen them blow up in my face in prod. There are lots of things that I used to think are great, which now I say “yeah …” unsurely because I’ve seen them blow up or not be a good fit.

I still have many miles to walk. Here some things that I’m predicting WITH MY MIND POWERS that I’ll learn and or gain from this new gig.

• vim - My vimfiles and dotfiles have been challenged. Not even an editor war. An editor civil war. Are leader keys evil? Is nerdtree evil? Yes!? What?! I submit. I yield! I see the speed at which you are navigating files. I have thought about your strategy before and not seen it in action. Fine. I will delete my .vimrc and use yours. I’ve done it before with janus. I can start over again. Each time, I learn something new. The goal now is to stay as close to vanilla vim as possible.

• Ruby - looking forward to pairing with lots of folks. I’ve been hearing a lot of great discussion. Lots of end-game topics. “What is intention revealing? What is this actually doing? What is the difference between these two classes? Let’s measure how fast this runs if we try it this way.”

• AWS - A bigger setup than I’m used to. VPC I’ve done. But not so many objects. Learning lots of integrations within AWS. Pulling and syncing to buckets and stuff. I’m sure I’ll be flexing the fog gem at some point.

• Instrumentation - It’s a big deal. There are many cloud services in action. Some are overlapping. It’s neat. It’s real. Retros where we look at code climate scores. Custom dashboards. I donated a raspberry pi for the cause. “Hook it up to the TV! Give me real insight. Get it done. Yay!” Pretty sweet.

• Automation and CM - Chef is being used in a really nice way. It’s changing and evolving. No sacred cows. Custom tooling. Chef server is a bit slow, so move everything out. Put state somewhere else. We need to beef up the custom bits of this. We’re also working on other tools around containers. There’s no single tool really. It’s very practical. No sacred tools. I’m very impressed with the ops folks. It’s kind of beautiful.

• The Business - It’s so easy to drown in tech. I’m looking forward to seeing all the pieces come together and watch something real happen. Ernie Miller said it best:

  Humane Development, to me, means the acknowledgement that we are humans working with humans to develop software for the benefit of humans.

  To me, this is where you see the user story get run not by your test suite but by a real customer or person. It’s the best part for lots of reasons.

Everyone is really good. That’s the job. The digs part is, our rental is coming to a close and we’ve bought a house. The next time I post might be from a different location. But not so far from where I’m at now. We love Portland. I miss friends/family but we’re staying.

I hope this town becomes a tech sanctuary for Bay Area and Seattle burnouts.